Let’s deal with the outbound BA experience first.

We catch the on-time (how nice) 4pm Saturday afternoon flight from Glasgow to Heathrow. We’re seated in an emergency row to accommodate my long legs, not because I want to be first out of the plane if it crashes. My (life-time) gold card allows me to choose my seats at the time of booking without an outrageous extra fee and I always try to get an emergency row seat if possible.

Neal, one of the cabin crew and at about 50 seems more experienced than most, welcomes me by name – that hardly ever happens. That’s what the gold card can get you sometimes.  Impressive.  He asks if there is anything we need, and I bite my tongue and don’t ask for a couple of glasses of champagne. He also has a line when he comes through the cabin collecting rubbish – “Let me have anything you don’t want – husbands, wives, small children”. The flight leaves and arrives 5 minutes early. We stay overnight at Heathrow. All good.

Our experience on the next flight is not so good.  We’d checked in for the 9.50am Nairobi flight the day before.   We were flying Premium Economy (I know, slumming it) and months ago I’d selected seats together (another benefit of having a gold card), 23J and 23K, for a good reason that we’ll come to. We get out boarding passes on our phones.

The day of the flight, we check in our two bags at the first class area (another benefit of having a gold card).  The check-in lady seems to spend a lot of time on the keyboard.  We get two paper boarding passes with the bag tags on Sabine’s.  Fine. However, as we’re walking down the jetway to the plane, I notice that while my paper boarding card is 23K, Sabine’s is 24E. 

And we’d used the paper ones to go through the boarding gates.  What the ****!!??  Does that mean that someone else has been given her seat? How on earth could that happen after she’d checked in on-line and had the 23J boarding pass on her phone?  

And why didn’t the check-in lady at the first-class desk say something to us?  Didn’t she see we’d checked in sitting together and then weren’t?  While she was doing all that hammering away on the keyboard to allocate Sabine a completely inappropriate seat, one of the middle seats in a row of four.  She could see we were travelling together. How could the BA check-in system let this happen?  It’s an 8 hour flight and we didn’t fancy being in the company of strangers.

When we get to the aircraft door, we take the cabin manager aside and tell him there’s a problem.  He checks his iPad, and allocates us 26J and K at the back of the Premium Economy cabin, all well, so he thinks. 

Someone comes on board and sits in Sabine’s seat. Lucky guy – he had no-one next to him the whole flight in what was otherwise a pretty full plane.

But contrary to the satisfaction in the mind of the cabin manager, all was not well as far as I was concerned. Another benefit of a gold card is that it means you’ve flown a lot with BA and can anticipate problems that you’ve seen before, and I’d chosen 23J and K in the middle of the cabin for a particular reason.  I’d sat at the back of the cabin before. And sure enough, it happened again.

We’re almost the last to be served lunch because they’d started at the other end of the cabin and we were offered two out of the three choices for main course.  Sabine was fine with the pasta option, but they’d run out of the third option, chicken tikka masala that, of course, I wanted.

Believe it or not, I don’t consider myself capable of meeting the high standards of arrogance demonstrated by a select group of entitled Jersey BA gold card holders who have been known to harangue the check-in staff, demanding that their plane has to leave because they have an important meeting in London (or holiday in the Caribbean …. make up your own reason), even though the island is completely fogged in and no incoming flights can land.

So, rarely do I pull this.  But I’d known it was almost certainly going to happen, because I’d had it happen to me before, hence the carefully thought through seat selection.  I said to Rash, the young cabin attendant, that I’d wanted the chicken and that sometimes on long haul flights, as a gold card holder, I’m asked for my choice of meal before the service starts. That hadn’t happened on this flight.

He was very embarrassed, saying that he would normally do that (really?, but he was mortified so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt) but his tablet wasn’t working so he didn’t know if there was a gold card holder in his cabin.  He apologised profusely.  He gave me the lamb option and said he would check in Club to see if they had a chicken meal. 

Which they did (herb chicken), would I like that (thank you very much) and back he came with it.  It was delicious.  And I could have had the lamb as well (which I declined) but I kept the bottle of red wine that went with it.  All good. Honour was served but it shouldn’t have happened. All because the BA check-in system malfunctioned.

Our other flight experiences were fine.  The seats were comfortable, the plane left and arrived on time, the entertainment system worked (I can remember when there’d be a 50/50 chance of it not working and on one flight even got a free bottle of champagne on the strength of it), and we enjoyed what we watched – Sabine watched the remake of Dune and I particularly liked the first three episodes of a series from Paramount+ called Lioness (nothing to do with safaris or a member of the England women’s soccer team).